creosote

[vinniem]

a sweep told me a trade secret, to rid flue of creosote,feed firebox with cardboard.has anyone heard of this?

 

[Battenkiller]

Yep. You'll get rid of every last bit of it... all at once.

 

[laynes69]

Good way to get rid of a home also. I guess I'm old school, brush and rods. Of course there are ways of reducing it and thats burning good hot fires with seasoned wood.

 

[cmonSTART]

Best thing to do is to burn in such a manner as to not produce it. If it's already there use a catalytic remover to soften it and then physically brush it clean. I don't know of anything cardboard can do except burn really hot. Just my opinion on the matter.

 

[Wood Duck]

Sounds like the instructions for starting a chimney fire. It is one way to get rid of creosote.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Welcome to the forum.


NO doubt he thinks a hot burn will rid the chimney of creosote. It also sounds as if he is not too bright.

As cmonSTART stated, prevention is still the best. Get your fuel right and you won't have problems. Try running poor fuel in your car and see what happens. Would driving with the throttle wide open cure the problem then? Maybe so, maybe not. Burn good fuel and then one won't have to try to sidestep and do things odd. Do it right to begin with.

 

[Battenkiller]

Get your fuel right and you won't have problems. Try running poor fuel in your car and see what happens. Would driving with the throttle wide open cure the problem then? Maybe so, maybe not. Burn good fuel and then one won't have to try to sidestep and do things odd. Do it right to begin with.

I don't follow that analogy. No water is the acceptable amount in auto fuel, and adding air won't help matters at all. Some water in firewood actually stabilizes the burn and slows it down to the combustion rate the stove was designed to have. Even oven-dried wood will create massive deposits inside a stove and flue pipe if you add a bunch of it to a hot coal bed and shut the air all the way. Extensive pyrolysis is all that will occur, and the extremely dense, cool smoke will go up the stack and condense on the flue walls. Proper fuel all by itself does not ensure a clean burn. You still need proper air.


The cardboard trick will work fine to eliminate buildups in the lower part of your flue, as long as you do it every day from the time the chimney was last cleaned. Complete compliance is difficult to achieve in humans, so there will probably be longer and longer intervals between times this is done. Then when you try it after 2 weeks of dirty burning, the whole lot may go up at once, including all the creosote that was too high up in the flue to get burned off by the hot fires. You now have a classic chimney fire.


I start each day with a blazing hot regular wood fire, so I have basically no creosote in the lower portion of my flue, but I would never dream of loading the stove up with cardboard after even a few weeks of burning wood. Way too risky.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Well, it shows that you did not follow the analogy. Perhaps I can put it simpler. Poor fuel = poor results.

As for the idea of a blazing hot fire every day, that is the "old" way and some still consider it correct. As for me, I will stick with what works and not feel I have to resort to doing "tricks" to get things working properly. The result of this is that we cleaned our chimney last summer after 2 full winter's burning 24/7 and got less than a cup of soot. The chimney is clean and we do nothing extra like burning a hot blazing fire. It is not needed.

I can fully agree with the air needs; any fire needs air. Any fire needs good fuel to burn properly too. That is my point.

 

[Fsappo]

Just use an EPA Certified stove with seasoned wood and use a creosote spray a few times a week. His suggestion is akin to fixing a dented front bumper of a car by ramming the car in the rear hard enough to push the front bumber out.

 

[Fsappo]

Nothing burns efficiently at "start" up. Theres always a brief time when the fuel is reaching combustion temps. But if it's done properly the heat from the fire building up after light off should clean out the little bit of whatever accumulated. It must be true, I've burned stoves for full seasons without much of a buildup.

 

[Fsappo]

The idea off applying pressure to one end of a damaged thing to fix the opposite end..never mind. Not my best analogy.

 

[firefighterjake]

So . . . Pook is moonlighting as a chimney sweep in the Boston area now?

Sorry . . . couldn't help myself.

To give a serious answer . . . or to reiterate what has already been said.

Technically, this is a very old school way of thinking . . . and I'm talking really, really old school . . . I've heard of old-timers who used to stuff hay in their chimney and touch it off . . . the idea being it would burn off the creosote. Burning a very hot fire daily is a little more "progressive" . . . the idea being you would get the temps high enough to cook off the creosote. The problem with both of these ideas is a) it could potentially damage your chimney, b) if your chimney has a cracked liner say this small chimney fire could lead to a major house fire and c) my experience has been that there is a much easier and better way of fixing this problem instead of cutting up a bunch of banana boxes and touching it off . . .

Rather than trying to fix the problem after the fact . . . by burning off the creosote, it is far, far easier and better to follow the three step process . . .

1. Burn dry wood . . . and by dry I mean well-seasoned wood . . . wood that has been cut, split and stacked for a year or so . . . or has a 20% or so moisture content . . . me I'm cheap (and easy) so I tend to just split, stack and wait for a year before burning . . . much easier for me and no need to buy a moisture meter.

2. Burn in the Goldilocks Zone . . . you burn too hot you risk damaging the chimney and igniting any creosote in the chimney, burn too cool and you produce creosote and all your neighbors will see the smoke coming out of your chimney so you can't be a Woodburning Stealth Ninja like me . . . and in case you were thinking "yeah, I burn pretty hot" . . . no good . . . you really need a thermometer or two to see if your idea of "pretty hot" is in fact hot . . . or cool.

3. Follow the first two steps and you should be golden . . . little to no creosote will be in the chimney . . . and you can take all those Fruit Loop, Sugar Smacks and Lucky Charm cardboard cereal boxes and recycle them instead of trying to make a bonfire in your woodstove . . . and doesn't it feel great to save the planet . . . I will be sending you the Planet Captain/Al Gore secret decoder ring in the mail . . . however I am a firm believer in always checking . . . and double checking . . . and so I encourage folks to check and clean their chimney. I check my chimney monthly . . . which is good for the newbie . . . once you get a feel for how you're burning you may wait a little longer before checking . . . although being the anal retentive sort of guy that I am (well that and the fact it would be really, really embarassing for me to have a chimney fire and I would be ridiculed to no end by my co-workers) I check it every month. For me it's a quick, easy procedure to check it . . . the only thing simpler for me is to clean out the the chimney . . . which gives me a clean creosote-free chimney and peace of mind.

 

[karri0n]

A chimney sweep once showed me a trade secret guaranteed to clean out the chimney. He took a bunch of fiberglass rods and screwed them together. Then he took a round brush and screwed it on the end of the rods. He climbed up a ladder onto the roof, and stuck the whole contraption down the chimney, then brushed it up and down. I figured he must be a nutcase, but he must have known something I don't because when he was finished the chimney was completely clean.

 

[cmonSTART]

karri0n, I just LOLed.

 

[karri0n]

what about glazed creosote?[/quote]


A catalyzing chemical is used to break the deposit down into a form that is more easily brushed.

In the case of glaze creosote, the "hot fire" or "firebox full of cardboard" technique would be a very dangerous approach.

 

[Battenkiller]

As for me, I will stick with what works and not feel I have to resort to doing "tricks" to get things working properly. The result of this is that we cleaned our chimney last summer after 2 full winter's burning 24/7 and got less than a cup of soot. The chimney is clean and we do nothing extra like burning a hot blazing fire. It is not needed.

Dennis, you have an unfair advantage since you are burning a catalytic stove. Maybe it's an intelligence advantage, since you are smart enough to know that's the best way to get a clean burn. Still, try stuffing the box of my Vigilant full of three-year old seasoned oak and shutting the air way down every night for two years running. See if you get a cup of brown soot then.

I burn hot every day because I feel I have to with my stove. Nothing dangerously high, flue wall temp about 600ºF until the stove top matches the flue temp (20-30 minutes). I started this year with the "new" stove and a cord of three-year old hardwood that came with the stove, plus 1/2 cord of 1+ year old white ash. I got smoke coming from the stack at some point almost every day. I got better burns once that was all gone and I was into my marginal wood. That's because I understood how the stove worked by then. So for me, the quality of the fuel was nowhere near as important as learning my stove's idiosyncrasies. The biggest idiosyncrasy is that after loading up with a full box of the very best seasoned wood, the stove sometimes allowed flue temps to drop below what I consider acceptable. The only reasonable response to that behavior is to burn it off in a hot fire the next morning. Besides, it's just good practice with a masonry chimney like mine to get the flue warmed up.

Old school isn't bad, it's just different. Old school says to cut three years in advance and store it outside in the elements to season. Anything wrong with that notion?

The EPA standards weren't put into place because it would be safer or burns would be more efficient, it was because of smoke pollution. I get good, hot relatively clean burns most of the time with a non-EPA stove that heats my whole house with a little more wood than my old stove used. I won't be buying a new stove anytime soon, maybe never. If I burn a bit more wood, so be it. I don't drive a truck anymore, so I'm doing my part for the environment in my own way. In the meantime, I now know my stove and how to burn efficiently and safely with it. 'Nuff said.

I showed this photo on the other creosote thread. It shows my lower flue up to and including the elbow just before it turns into the thimble. It was taken about a week or so ago, after I had burned 4 full cord of wood. The photo was taken by sticking a camera up from inside the stove and firing away until I got something that was in focus. The shot was taken just how I found the stove at about 10 AM after a long overnight burn finally got low enough to get inside there. There is a very thin haze of fresh soot from the night before, but it is mostly ash carried up from the stove. I'm sure that after I got the fire going good (about 550-600ºF for about half an hour) all of that brown turned to white just like the griddle top and damper plate get. I don't know how many cups of soot I'll have, but this can be done with a non-cat, non-EPA stove just by diligently running it on the hot side.